Re: Re: Energy and politics.

[Eugene Coyle <eugenecoyle@xxxxxxx>]

Rob, there IS a plan in California to sell excess power back into the grid. 
It is in the law, and is called "Net metering."  The law has been
changed a couple of times but I think it is now set up so that you could
actually get cash at the end of the year if you supplied a net amount. 
This is for photovoltaics, not for other sources.  There is no talk
of solar water heating or other sensible ideas.

    In terms of coal, I agree it won't be built in California -- but the good folks in Utah would gladly have the pollution and send us the electricity.  Same with Wyoming and Montana.

    Gov. Davis said publically yesterday or the day before that the State of Calif might build power plants if no other fix came along.

Tom Walker asked if high tech usage would go down with a recession.  Yes, but maybe not by too much.  One of the big new energy hogs are the "server hotels" -- big warehouses full of computer servers for the internet, gobbling up power.  I'd guess those would keep sucking up the juice, though maybe the increase in the number of servers would slow down.  Anybody know why those have to be in California?  Or can they be anywhere?  Why not put them in the coal fields, next to a mine-mouth power plant, and at least save the transmission losses?

    Meanwhile the economists at the better schools tell us to charge marginal cost and buy forward.  That will take care of it.  In response, I am trying to write a single equation that will solve this problem.  I keep coming up with E = MC^2.  Might work.

    Actually part of the phenomenal increase in prices up and down the West Coast is the auction method in Calif.  Any supplier that gets dispatched gets paid the price of the most expensive bidder that gets dispatched.  The profits are enormous.

Gene Coyle

Rob Schaap wrote:

Scary post, Gene!

And a hard winter in Europe and North America may compress much of the story
into very little time, eh?  I imagine richer Californians are on to roof
solar cells in a big way.  Is there a plan in California by which a
households' excess power is directed back into the grid, btw?  I'd imagine
this'd hardly threaten an excess production problem, so even a
megabroker-controlled utility wouldn't mind paying wholesale rates for those
bits of potential embarrassment-avoidance.

As for the rest of your scenario, I really can't imagine Californians
letting coal power back.  Red is all but dead, but green is still big there.
 Non-compliance with Kyoto can easily be dressed up as a proud recovery of
national sovereignty on the part of a much put-upon Uncle Sam (I dare say it
already is).  And as for global warming, I imagine that'll kill
Bangladeshis, Malvinans and Tongans first.  So no problem there.  Then the
West European economies will lose the Guinea current and their economies
will ice up.  Mebbe even some short-term advantage there for US producers.
But, yeah, whilst America might ride the first physical assaults the more
comfortably, its time will come.  As everyone else'll be well-fucked by
then, whatever they might choose to do then won't matter much.

Maybe I spend too much time on Crash-L (I do tend to see climate in this
weather everyone's having), but I can't help but feel what went on at the
Hague last month, coupled with the unprecedented primacy of 'shareholder
value' and the ascendancy of that Sahara Club posterboy, well, it all looks
like there's absolutely nothing in our institutions and dispositions capable
of responding to any of this (oil-dependence, aquifer-depletion,
soil-degradation and fisheries-disembowelment all included).  Nope.  If
anything positive is gonna transpire - and if there be time for it to
transpire, well, it'll have to take the form of some kinda overwhelming
extra-institutional groundswell.

And it ain't like anyone's in any position to spot a point-of-no-return,
either.  That point will declare itself, I fear, in the denouement itself.
As Steven Wright reminds us, experience is something you get just after you
needed it.

He also says a fool and his money are soon partying, so I'm off for some
Vat69 and a blast of Junior Wells (it'll have to be a CD sadly; no turntable
in the shed) ... snatch it back and hold it ... somebody gotta help us, coz
we can't help ourselves ...

Sigh.

Gargling and puffing amongst the Huntsman spiders (and a stunning hawkmoth
caterpillar  - dauntingly horned at the front, fat and sleekly green all the
four centimetres to the false eyes glaring at me from atop a modest
fundament whence might issue the very tribute of which the 'Bureau of
Transport and Communications Economics Report on Diffusion of
Communications, Entertainment and Information Services' beneath it is so
deserving),
Rob.

>    Let me conclude by saying that I think this is heralding a major
>political earthquake.  But I have no sense of what the place will look
>like after the first few shock waves.